Bush Plans Speeches With Coherent, Unified Message. Believe it or not, this headline was in the Times, not the Onion.

Salman Rushdie:
Yes, This Is About Islam, ‘ Highly motivated organizations of Muslim men (oh, for the voices of Muslim

women to be heard!) have been engaged over the last 30 years or so in

growing radical political movements out of this mulch of “belief.” These

Islamists — we must get used to this word, “Islamists,” meaning those who

are engaged upon such political projects, and learn to distinguish it from

the more general and politically neutral “Muslim” — include the Muslim

Brotherhood in Egypt, the blood-soaked combatants of the Islamic

Salvation Front and Armed Islamic Group in Algeria, the Shiite

revolutionaries of Iran, and the Taliban. Poverty is their great helper, and

the fruit of their efforts is paranoia. This paranoid Islam, which blames

outsiders, “infidels,” for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed

remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is

presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.

This is not wholly to go along with Samuel Huntington’s thesis about the

clash of civilizations, for the simple reason that the Islamists’ project is

turned not only against the West and “the Jews,” but also against their

fellow Islamists. ‘ NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

Stories of Ghosts Who Infest the Living: “…(I)t does not take death to make ghosts of some of us. This year’s Cannes International Film Festival showed several tales of earthly spirits bearing earthly sorrows — lost souls leading the half-lives of those who never learned how to inhabit their own houses or jobs or marriages or even skin.

One such film was Joel and Ethan Coen’s Man Who Wasn’t There, which opens Wednesday. It’s the story of Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton), a small town barber in California in 1949 who is unable to grab a piece of the American dream.” NY Times [“FMHreader”, “FMHreader”]

Mystery space blast ‘solved’. The famous June 1908 monster blast — estimated at 10-15 megatons — in Tunguska, Siberia seems to have been an asteroid. Solving such a mystery is a letdown in a way; there were many more exotic and bizarre explanations floating around out there — like a collision with a wandering chunk of antimatter or the detonation of a disabled extraterrestrial spacecraft. The event had a starring role in an X-Files episode one or two seasons ago, if I recall… BBC

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